Top apps to outfit a new iPad or iPad mini

If you just got a new Apple tablet, download these apps first.

You know the scenario: a friend or family member got an iPad or iPad mini as a gift this week. Now they want to know what to do with the pretty slab of aluminum and glass. The App Store can be an overwhelming place, with programs that can transform the iPad into a word processor, a MIDI instrument, or a 3D gaming machine. That variety can be daunting if you are sampling the App Store for the very first time, but here's a place to start for those new to tablets.

We chose a few popular categories that cover some of the most common usage scenarios, then listed the top app in each that we would recommend to a friend. In some categories, we also mention alternatives that might appeal to those with more specialized tastes. (If you got a Nexus 7 or other Android tablet this holiday season, we have recommendations for you, too.)

Image editor

The iPad's screen is great for editing images, and photo buffs have no dearth of options for editing images while on the go. However, Google's Snapseed (free) is our top recommendation for editing images. It includes the standard editing controls like brightness, contrast, saturation, and color balance, along with tools that are common on mobile devices, like vintage-style filters and grungy borders.

Enlarge/ Snapseed can quickly transform even mundane mobile snaps into works of art.

Snapseed also has a nice touch-centric interface, with most effects adjusted by sliding left or right. Localized editing is also available for some adjustments, and some effects and filters can be adjusted using a "random" shuffle button for infinite variations. Sharing options include Google+, Facebook, and Twitter, but you can also send a photo to other apps registered to accept image input, such as Instagram or Photoshop Touch.

Another good option is Apple's own iPhoto ($4.99), which has a unique editing interface that also plays well with the iPad's touch input. In addition to editing, iPhoto also includes additional organizing features, the ability to create special online galleries replete with themes and other design elements, and integration with iPhoto on the desktop.

Users that already live and die by Photoshop might also consider Adobe's Photoshop Touch ($9.99), which can integrate with the desktop version via the company's Creative Cloud subscription service.

Text editor

Text editors are also a hot category for the iPad. Whether you feel at home with the on-screen touch keyboard or carry around an external keyboard, plenty of writers appreciate the iPad's small size and portability for writing whenever and wherever inspiration strikes.

Though Senior Apple Editor Jacqui Cheng prefersWriting Kit ($4.99), I would recommend iA Writer ($0.99) instead. The program has a simple and clean interface, supports Markdown for simple formatting that easily converts to HTML, and can sync files via iCloud and Dropbox.

Enlarge/ iA Writer's interface focuses on simplicity to get out of the way of the writing process.

If you need full-featured word processor, Apple's Pages ($9.99) is an excellent option, with support for lots of text formatting and styles, images, and other advanced layout options. It can also import or export Word-compatible files, a must for those working in most office environments.

Cloud storage

Apple already gives every iOS device user a free iCloud account, which can be used to sync certain data between iOS devices. It also syncs data between apps if you use a Mac. However, for any type of file syncing outside of Apple's somewhat limited iCloud APIs, Dropbox (free) should fit the bill for most users. The iOS app was recently updated with improved syncing controls and photo viewing. Dropbox also offers integrated storage syncing for OS X, Windows, and Linux, and many apps (like the aforementioned iA Writer) use Dropbox as a cloud syncing option in addition to—or instead of—iCloud.

News

You can of course use Safari to browse your favorite news sources online or download specialized reading apps from The Economist (free) or The New York Times (free). But sometimes it's better to have the news aggregated and presented in a more digestible form.

If you prefer to get a curated list of the most interesting news about your favorite topics, then Flipboard (free) is the app for you. The highly visual, magazine-like presentation looks great on the iPad, you can check out stories recommended by Flipboard staff, and it's easy to share great finds via Facebook and Twitter integration.

Enlarge/ Flipboard combs the Web for top stories on your favorite subjects.

If you'd rather quickly browse headlines from all your favorite sites, an RSS feed reader might be a better choice. Reeder ($4.99) integrates with Google's Reader service, easily syncing with a desktop version. It also offers a number of sharing options, including sending articles to services like Evernote and Readability.

Enlarge/ Reeder is great for a more traditional approach to reading RSS feeds.

Messaging

The iPad comes equipped with the Messages app, which can communicate with other iPads, iPhones, and Macs using Apple's iMessages protocol. And FaceTime handles video chats with your friends that are in the Apple fold. But if you use other common chat protocols, such as AIM or Gtalk, you'll need a separate app.

Some chat services have their own dedicated apps (such as AIM, Yahoo, and Facebook), but why not use a single app that can use all popular services at once? For that, Verbs IM ($0.99) is a good value. It handles AIM/iChat, Facebook, and GTalk, and it has a clean, easy-to-use interface.

Enlarge/ Verbs IM covers the most common chat platforms, including AIM/iChat, Facebook, and GoogleTalk.

(Users that need wider service support—especially international services like Sina Weibo, VKontakte, or Mamba.ru—might instead check out IM+ Pro [$0.99].)

While Verbs IM will take care of text chats, Skype for iPad (free) is your go-to service for voice or video chats outside of FaceTime. The mobile app works just as well with Skype users on the desktop as it does with other mobile users.

Music

There are lots of options for listening to music outside of your own iTunes library. Streaming services are a great fit for mobile devices since you can access a large library of music without having to buy tracks or albums and sync them via iTunes. Spotify (free) is among our favorite services, and US users can listen to streaming "radio" for free. You can also easily share your listening habits with Facebook friends or log data with Last.fm. An additional premium subscription gives you access to playlist syncing and offline listening.

Enlarge/ Spotify's iPad interface is slick, and makes discovering new music easy.

But the iPad is also a great device for making music. Even if you aren't an experienced musician, Apple's GarageBand ($4.99) includes a virtual orchestra and a library of pre-made loops for building a song that's your very own. Those with even a rudimentary understanding of music theory can record original compositions using a combination of real or virtual instruments, mixing down an almost limitless number of tracks into the next hit song.

Enlarge/ Even casual users can eke out hours of fun out of GarageBand's collection of virtual "smart" instruments.

Games

Games are hard to recommend, since not all types of games appeal to everyone. However, iOS is a formidable gaming platform for gamers of all ages and preferences, so we'll just pick a few of our favorites to get started.

If there were a first game we would recommend for almost anyone, it's probably Words With Friends HD (free with ads or $0.99 without). The artwork is stunning on a Retina display, the rules are similar to Scrabble, and tons of people play it; you should be able to find a friend to play with easily enough. Words With Friends can also optionally match you up with friends or strangers alike with similar skill levels—it's no fun regularly getting schooled by your friend's mom who happens to have a PhD in English, trust me.

Enlarge/ The basic Scrabble-like gameplay is there, and so are all your Facebook friends.

A few other casual favorites are worth mentioning. If you really like word games, definitely check out Letterpress (free); it's a novel take on word games that sort of mashes up Scrabble and Boggle in a one-on-one match to test your vocabulary mettle. If retro 8-bit arcade games appeal to you, consider The Incident ($0.99)—its infectious NES-style soundtrack alone is worth the purchase price. Plants vs Zombies HD ($0.99) is a great tower defense style game that blends a bit of action and strategy with great artwork and tongue-in-cheek humor. And Ticket to Ride ($6.99), a game centered on building a railroad in turn-of-the-century America, has to be the best board game adaptation ever to grace an iOS device.

If you consider yourself a serious gamer attracted to action and awesome 3D graphics, Infinity Blade II ($2.99) is a great place to start. The touch-based fighting controls are pretty easy to use, if hard to master. The half-fantasy, half-sci-fi backstory is interesting, the weaponry options are vast, and the game has enough puzzles and mysteries to keep you going for hours on end.

Enlarge/ Slash and hack your way through this second installment of the Infinity Blade series.

Weather

Unlike the iPhone, the iPad doesn't include a native weather app. You can see basic weather information in Notification Center, but that's it. Fortunately, the lack of an official Apple app has encouraged several developers to try and fill the void. Our recommendation is AccuWeather for iPad (free), which includes a full complement of current weather data from AccuWeather.com, along with hourly and 15-day forecasts, satellite maps, and iCloud syncing of preferences between iOS devices.

Some may find the ads a little bothersome, but don't fret: there are dozens of other options in the App Store, both paid and free.

E-reading

One popular use for a tablet is reading e-books, and Apple knows it. The integrated Newsstand automatically collects apps for subscribing to and reading your favorite magazines and newspapers, for instance. And iBooks (free) is an absolute must-download. Not only does it allow you to browse and buy standard e-books as well as enhanced e-texts from the iBookstore, it also handles standard, DRM-free ePub and PDF files as well.

Enlarge/ iBooks can handle standard ePub and PDF files in addition to books purchased from the iBookstore.

(If you've gotten an iPad after using a Nook or Kindle e-ink device, you can get dedicated apps for accessing your existing content from Barnes & Noble or Amazon, respectively.)

If you like your nonfiction filled with tons of useful rich media, though, definitely give Inkling (free) a try. Inkling books are geared towards learning, so they include tons of interactive content like images, interactive graphs, videos, and more; some programming books also include an integrated interpreter to try code samples live as you read. Books can be purchased from Inkling's website, and since the format is built around standards like HTML5 and JavaScript, you can also read Inkling books on the desktop via any modern browser.

Just a start

Of course, the App Store has far more available than the handful of apps we recommend here, but the list should help tablet newcomers get up to speed with finding, installing, and launching quality apps. Once they're comfortable doing so, it's time to truly start exploring.

58 Reader Comments

Great article, but do all of us a favor: revisit this topic around tax refund time (late-January to mid-April) .

Not all of us can afford shiny new iPads/iPad minis for Christmas to give/receive, but tax time for many (including me) is Christmas II: Rabid Adults. When that time comes a lot of the financially unstable will definitely grab one and will need all of the advice they can get, especially for first-time iPad owners (again, including me).

"The Elements," by Theodore Grey and Touch Press. This is the kind of app that really shows what a tablet can do for an interactive book. If there had been things like this when I was a child, I suspect that not only would I have done a lot better in school, I might have switched from computers to more of the hard sciences.

The more I think of it, anything put out by Touch Press... They really seem to have grasped the concept of interactive books and run with it. They have things for gemstones, poetry and most recently, "The Orchestra." Fantastic stuff and worth every penny.

Newsify is another fantastic RSS reader which plays nice with Google Reader - syncs and marks read articles and so on. It is only 0.99 and it allows sharing with external apps such as Pocket (which I use for delayed reading).

An app with great, free courses that allow you to learn at your own pace. Loads of universities from Stanford, Cambridge, Oxford to the OU provide courses. And if you don't like the course, try another.

My only issue with the app is that there is no Mac OS X version (why Apple? why? and why no iBooks for Mac OS X?)

I highly recommend Tunein Radio in any of its versions. I find it to be the best app for listening to radio stations from all around the world. It's very easy to use, and the Pro version, at least, allows you to record what you're listening to, among other great features.

As mentioned aove, Tune-in radio is a superb internet radio streaming app.

If you want to design or draw then iDesign, iDraw, or TouchDraw are brilliantl They would give CorelDraw or Illustrator a run for thier money and cost only a fraction of price.

Music wise, Morphwize is really fun and the Korg iMS-20 simulation is fantasic. Just two of many great music apps.

And finally, for the secure storage of data, mSecure is a multiplatform app that can use a secure file on Dropbox to sync all your devices. I have it on my iphone, ipad, android phone and macbook. And right now its on sale apparently!

For PDF reading I like using iAnnotate Pro, though lately there have been other suggestions being floated around.

For games, I can't believe that Angry Birds didn't get a mention. It's hard to believe at this time that someone hasn't thought of it, but with frequent free updates (Seasons has 3 years worth of holiday events now) you get a lot of playability out of it. Other old standbys include Tiny Wings, those two games by themselves probably gave me tons of iPad gaming fun.

For music creation, though Garageband is nice, for on-the-fly Music Making I prefer Figure by Propellerheads. It's cheap, has great use of the touchscreen, super easy to use, sounds great, and you can actually put out some great songs.

Offline Pages is also useful for people with Wifi only iPads. It allows you to download a page locally to your iPad. Grab a few really long Wikipedia articles, some recipes, whatever, for local storage in those times when you're going to your friends' houses. Though cloud storage is great the reality is that not everyone has network access all the time!

Trillian. The mature Desktop IM client is pretty excellent on Mobile, especially if you use desktop trillian. Alerts that are sensitive to what device you're active on. Accounts that are logged in remotely to save battery life.

It's only 99 cents, and though it's short and the puzzles are mostly simple (I blew through it in one afternoon) it has nearly endless replay value due to the huge database of things you can create to allow you to go back through again and try new strategies to solve the old puzzles.

For global weather data, the weather underground has an excellent Wundermap with all kinds of overlays (if you knew anyone who has ever worked for and been let go by them you might boycott all things Accuweather).

I totally agree with the choices of Reeder and Flipboard, they compliment each other very well. I use both. I used to be a pretty hardcore fan of NetNewsWire, I've been using it since .9x on my Mac, however a lot of RSS readers have come out that are much more rich in features. You can add Instapaper, Evernote, Twitter among others, to Reeder and post directly to those accounts. Flipboard, OTOH, is a 'curated' news source. I can't tell you how many apps that I've gotten on sale for free just from their Apps feed. You can also add RSS feeds, however the process for doing that is a little clunky and you don't have the same functionality as a dedicated RSS reader. If I'm in an Instagram browsing mood, I can browse through my feed using Flipboard quite nicely.

I agree with EmeraldArcana's choice of Figure, by Propellerhead, as a music creation app. It's super simple, really easy to make songs on, and even if you're not in a song creating mood, it's fun to play around with just for making groovy kooky sounds on the fly. All of the Korg apps are slick and fun to use, however they're higher-end with a much higher price tag. They also have a much higher learning curve if you've never used apps or real devices like those.

The Android article mentions Jetpack Joyride. I don't think it's possible to overstate how cool that game is for casual gamers. One control. Your finger or thumb. That's it. It does have IAP's however those are not necessary to advance further in the game, they're strictly aesthetic add-ons. Ones that you can get just through playing the game anyway. Minigore and Minigore 2, for me, are also a must. They're the best two stick shooter stay-alive-for-as-long-as-you-can games that I've played, and I've played a lot of them. Minigore 2 has more of an RPG feel in that you advance through levels and can upgrade things. Without being mind-bogglingly complex.

I know that an AppleTV article that talks about the things you can do with it and another iOS device is a whole other ball of wax. I'll just say that playing your favorite tower defense game on your iPad with the output going to your ATV via Airplay/mirroring is an awesome experience.

How and why is Spotify still being recommended when Rdio boasts 18 million songs and is available in so many regions globally? The supremely intuitive app experience leaves Spotify in the dust, the social features add to the already first-rate discovery options, while the method of cataloguing your favourite music is far superior.

I thank you for your suggestions. As a weather junkie, I just *had* to download AccuWeather. It's a handy competitor to my usual favorites (Weather+ and LivingEarth). And I have several others, of course. I thank you also for Writing Kit: loads much faster than Pages, and I find exporting to, and saving on, Evernote, much preferable to iCloud. One photo editor you might want to inspect is PhotoForge2. For the niche few who're webdevs, I recommend Textastic and (if you use wordpress.com) the Wordpress app.

My wife and I love to play PuzzleJuice together on the ipad, it's an action packed game that mixes a bit of Tetris with a word game. There's always a time pressure to find words before the blocks pile up. We love playing zen mode for a 90 second challenge.

Other is WELDER, which has an interesting multiplayer mode where you compete against each other to score more words.

For people that like to draw and sketch I have a few really good suggestions:

- Sketch Club is a rather complete universal sketch app with tons of templates, brushes and options, it can export to PDF, PNG and can make high definition movies of your sketche. It's also a full online community that doesn't suck and has great people and contests in it... It's two or 3 bucks and its my top choice for fun doodling. Mac resolution is 2048x1536 and 10 layers.

- Sketchbook Pro is between 1 and 10 bucks depending wen you buy it, has incredibly good brushes, layers and blending modes, iCloud support, opens regular sketchbook files and can make 6MP images of up to 24 layers.

- Sketchbook Ink is vector based line drawing but it's actually bitmap in export, it has very few options but it does have layers, gallery support and it exports pictures at 33MP.

- ProCreate has the best brushes of them all, very customizeable, packs for sale, layers, blending modes, etc. it's simple to use and very powerful.

- For vectors as previously said, Touch Draw and iDraw are the best I've tried, they both export and import SVG support layers, symbols, have good rulers, support Drpbox, proton ting, PDF export and have tons of presets. They're about 8 bucks each.

"The Elements," by Theodore Grey and Touch Press. This is the kind of app that really shows what a tablet can do for an interactive book. If there had been things like this when I was a child, I suspect that not only would I have done a lot better in school, I might have switched from computers to more of the hard sciences.

I found The Elements to be long on style and short on substance or enduring value. Lots of interactivity for interactivitie's sake, maybe interesting as an experiment but I bought it shortly after it turned out out of curiosity and still felt disappointed. I say this not to spoil your enjoyment, but to let other people who come here looking for reccomendations know that there are differences of opinion on this one.

On the other hand, I found the first installment of the EO Wilson Biology Book project on iBooks to be much more successful and I've also liked the various smaple chapters I've downloaded in the Inkling app.

I keep my BluRay files on a NAS in mkv format at 1080p with DTS audio (where possible). I've tried every streaming app under the sun (let's say at least 15 streaming apps), but I can not get my iPad to play them back smoothly.

Can anyone suggest an app that will stream my mkv files from my NAS to my iPad without the movie skipping every few seconds?

"Stream to me" is awesome. All your media streamed to you from your home computer over Wifi or 3g for just $2.99! It just works perfectly, and is even airplay compatible, so you can send the stream to your appletv from your phone or iPad.

Reeder for the iPad hasn't been worked on in so long. Has the developer moved on to new projects?

Not sure, but the most recent version released approx 8 months ago had a ton of negative feedback. I paid twice for that app (iphone and ipad) and had they continued improving it, would've paid for the OSX version. I'm still using Reeder but I'm open to switching if a "killer" google reader app comes out.

Ewwww, I can't stand Dropbox. I find their terms of service offensive, (i.e. We can use your shit however we like.) Last time I checked, Box.Net was comparable and far less invasive. Now if only more app devs would integrate with them...